Disney shares rose Thursday after news that the company was cutting costs and firing 7,000 employees. The real news is that the studio, formerly a family friend, lost 2.4 million streaming subscribers and has no plans to stop the woke programming that drove them away.
Including me.
We have all the details about layoffs that affected approximately 3% of employees.
Who isn’t getting the boot? Latoya Raveneau is a Disney+ producer who has admitted to pushing a “gay agenda”, adding queerness to children’s programming whenever she can.
Or Jim Morris, who runs Disney’s Pixar division. Pixar has slowly lost steam since 2006 when Disney bought the computer animation studio from Steve Jobs. The company’s last three films, Luca and Turning Red were huge flops. Lightyear was perhaps the most disastrous of all the films. It took a Toy Story bad-ass astronaut, whose catchphrase was “To Infinity and Beyond!” and made him an all-too-typical white male clone who couldn’t even leave one planet.
Or Kathleen Kennedy. She is the head of Lucasfilm, which she bought from George Lucas for $4 billion in 2012. She has been running Star Wars into the ground since then with bad scripts and “the Force IS female” wokeness.
Worse, the damage to beloved characters such as Han Solo and Luke Skywalker is still to come. They became unrecognizable and unlikeable and unheroic respectively in The Force Awakens or The Last Jedi.
Here’s the best part:
Luke Skywalker has been the focal point of discussions on LGBTQ+ representation. A story in Stories of the Jedi and Sith published a story in June 2022 in which Luke Skywalker was shown as attracted to a male character. This story is now part of Disney’s Star Wars canon.
The report states that Sam Maggs (writer) was hired by Disney’s Star Wars. It continues: “Openly admits to including the queer character in her work as part her mission to promote LGBTQ+ representations in the media.”
It’s one thing for gay characters to be included, but it’s another. To send an old fan a message, it’s quite another thing to ret-con Luke, a straight character. This message is: “Everything that you love, we are able to destroy.”
ASIDE: The Mandalorian is another Disney+ streamer and the only bright spot in the Star Wars constellation of movies and shows. Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni are the show’s true fans. Some fans are wondering if Mando is losing his magic after last year’s disappointing Boba Fett spinoff series.
I won’t even begin to discuss the demise and fall of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). Endgame was the culmination of a remarkable series of 23 action movies with big budgets. Nothing else can compare to Star Wars and Fast & Furious. Instead of ending the story, the MCU continues to plod along with absurd sequels that diminish once-mighty heroes (Thor: Love and Thunder), or feature huge casts of people we have never heard of (The Immortals), and which neither the director nor the script could make the audience care about. The ticket sales have been generally disappointing.
Oops.
The problem with Disney isn’t its inordinate number of employees. Disney’s problem lies in the fact that so much of its content fails to entertain or is directed at a small segment of angry wokesters rather than at its core audience of people aged 25 and under.
Their parents are just like mine.
Disney+ lost $ 4 billion last year. There is very little old-school content available to win back viewers and turn a profit. The Mandalorian, Hawkeye, and other audience pleasers are rare and far between.
Bob Iger, the Mouse House’s returning CEO, could have fired far fewer people with more important jobs and done more to reverse its fading fortunes. Instead, he is enabling more of the rot that corrupts so many beloved franchises and characters.
You might be right.